TOLEDO, Ohio – Trying to stop the erosion of organized labor, union leaders are looking beyond their core auto and steel industries to recruit service workers making low wages and professionals worrying about losing their health coverage.

The new faces of unions are immigrants working at construction sites, hospital nurses, parking lot attendants, mechanics and casino dealers – all groups unlikely to lose their jobs to overseas workers.

“What’s left anymore?” said Al Mixon, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 507 in Cleveland, which just finalized a contract with American Red Cross employees in northern Ohio. “We’re all forced to look into new areas.”

This may be just the beginning of the reshaping of unions at a time when factory jobs are being sent overseas or lost to technological changes.

“As we lose manufacturing jobs, we’re going to move more into non-traditional occupations,” said United Auto Workers Ohio President Lloyd Mahaffey. “The issues aren’t different whether it’s a health care facility or a factory. It’s about having a voice.”

In the past year, the UAW signed up 2,500 new members in Ohio at auto parts plants, county jails and a juvenile courthouse. The national union last year voted to move $60 million from its strike fund into recruiting new members.

“We had a good year,” Mahaffey said. “But it wouldn’t be fair to say we’re replacing everyone we lose.”

Job losses at the Big Three automakers and at parts makers knocked down UAW membership to below 600,000 in 2005, from a high of 1.5 million in 1979.

Union membership has declined steadily nationwide over the past 50 years. In 2006, about 12 percent of American workers belonged to a union compared with a third of all workers in the 1950s.

“The question is have unions fallen so far and so fast that they can’t get up,” said Gary Chaison, a labor specialist at Clark University in Worcester, Mass. “I give them a 50-50 chance.”

Unions likely need at least 500,000 new members each year just to make up for their annual losses, he said.

“They don’t have to look overseas for fertile fields,” he said. “It’s all around them. They just have to use their imagination.”

The Service Employees International Union has organized child-care providers who work at home in Illinois and janitors who clean office towers in Houston.

The union has doubled in size in a little over a decade, to 1.8 million members, and now is trying to unionize janitors in Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus.

“We need health care, we need better wages,” Lauressie Tillman said at an organizing rally in Cincinnati in March.

Tillman makes $6.85 an hour cleaning offices downtown to support her family of four. She has diabetes and must pay for doctor visits. “I don’t have money for my medicine,” she said.

One challenge in organizing new members is that many workers don’t value unions like they once did, forcing labor leaders to reintroduce and redefine themselves.

They are pushing for more than better wages, telling workers that access to health care and the ability to join unions are civil rights – not just bargaining chips.

And they are becoming less adversarial.

“Workers are looking for an organization that solves problems, not one that creates them,” said Andy Stern, president of the Service Employees union.

Too many labor leaders are concerned only about negotiating contracts for their own members and aren’t focused on solving problems facing all workers such as the lack of an adequate health care system, he said.

“For way too long, we’ve tried to stay the same and, in some cases, stop change,” Stern said. “That’s a losing strategy.”

Unions also are trying to become a bigger part of their members’ everyday lives. That means bringing back labor-sponsored family events such as pumpkin patches and mother-daughter banquets.

“It’s an old idea regenerated,” said Bill Lichtenwald, president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters Local 20 in Toledo. Its membership has been cut in half since 1980 and now is down to 7,000.

The union offers casino bus trips and ballroom dancing lessons at special rates.

And Teamsters are going into schools to talk with students about what unions offer their members and how they have shaped the middle class.

“We’re taking a lot of steps to re-educate,” Lichtenwald said. “It used to be that labor unions were respected. That reputation went away.”

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